WS - Role of Narrative in our Music Video

It is a common convention of Alternative Rock videos to combine Narrative and Performance aspects to a video. This is something that we are trying to replicate in our own video as it seems to be a key convention. 

From looking at videos in our genre, we also found that a theme of isolation and loneliness was quite common, two examples of this been Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day and Jeremy by Pearl Jam. The idea of a Narrative is also to have some link to the lyrics of the song. For these reasons we decided on a Narrative based on a person who is obsessed with Muse - the "muse nerd". Throughout the narrative we show this obsession through him listening to music by the band, the use of album covers and magazine covers (these are not all from Muse, but a number of them are) and at one point through dressing in the same way as a band member. As well as the obsession of Muse, the protagonist is also very lonely and isolated, an idea that we changed to from bullying as we felt bullying was exceptionally hard to realistically portray with the actors available to use and made for a weak storyline.

The Narrative is intercut amongst the Performance aspects of our video and is filmed in a number of locations, another thing very common in our genre. The Narrative part of our video is vital and is what would hopefully make people want to watch the video more than once.

Another key point to our Narrative is a gaming theme, where the protagonist is playing computer games because in this virtual world he can be powerful and popular, two things that he isn't in the real world. Throughout the narrative the audience should pick up on the differences here and the contrast of the two to see just how different the two 'lives' are. 

Pressure and depression builds up on the protagonist throughout the video, culminating in a  suicide scene at the end of the video. This is also the case in the video Jeremy by Pearl Jam that I referred to earlier. The reason we chose this was because we thought it was a powerful end to our Narrative and we wanted something strong at the end to try and entice people to watch the video more than once. The mixing up of game footage, real life footage and time lapses during our narrative would also hopefully achieve the same thing by being interesting, but also slightly confusing to someone watching it for the first time.

The role of Narrative in our video is very different to the original and official Bliss video by Muse. Obviously we weren't going to simply copy their video, nor would it be possible for us to  do with our budget and us not having the equipment to replicate it. The idea that we have taken on though is to re-brand the idea and song and so we have gone for a very different approach. This approach is to link the narrative to the lyrics through the overall idea. We feel like we managed that with our final idea with scenes revolving around loneliness and isolation.